The next great period of English history, that of the Stuart kings, is dealt with by Professor Gardiner. =Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829- )= was born at Ropley, in Hampshire, and was educated at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. His whole life has been devoted to the most laborious research in the annals of the reigns of James I., Charles I., and the Protectorate of Cromwell. He has not, like Mr Froude, taken up history as a pleasant literary recreation, but has given years of unremitting labour to the production of each separate volume. He is now well into the study of the Protectorate, the first volume of his history of which appeared in 1894. He has written many minor books, one dealing with "The Gunpowder Plot," and another with "Cromwell's Place in History." Mr Gardiner will not perhaps be counted a brilliant writer. He gives us none of the fire and eloquence, almost bordering on poetry, which we find so abundantly in Froude; but he has been described by Sir John Seeley as the only historian who has trodden the controversial ground of seventeenth-century English political history with absolute fairness and impartiality. James and Charles, Buckingham and Bristol, Strafford and Pym, stand out in clear and well-defined lineaments. There is no hero-worship to blind us; no flowing rhetoric to atone for insufficient knowledge. We see these men in their weakness and in their strength, neither side monopolising the virtue and the patriotism, but each, on occasion, acting from noble or ignoble motives. It may be urged that too much attention is devoted to the follies of princes and the intrigues of courtiers, and certainly of the inner life of the nation we get all too little in Mr Gardiner's pages: but it may be fairly said that these books are the safest and best of guides to one of the most important and critical periods in our political history. It is impossible to avoid contrasting Mr Gardiner with a far more popular and more brilliant historian, Lord Macaulay, and the contrast is, in some respects, in favour of the former. Mr Gardiner sees that in dealing with the complexities of human motives we are on very uncertain and delicate ground. We need to pause step by step to weigh probabilities and to qualify our every statement, although such hesitancy and qualification is not conducive to brilliant writing.